Opening today for an eight day run at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s well-loved Vancity Theatre (on Seymour, just north of Davie Street, and across from Emery Barnes Park), the film considered by many film enthusiasts to be the best 2019 film released in what, to date, has pretty much been a fallow year for those among us who love cinema — and that special film of which we write is Diane, a certain awards winner come year’s end, most especially for the film’s star, Mary Kay Place, who according to Vancity programmer Tom Charity, “gets the role of a lifetime.”
As Variety’s lead film critic Owen Gleiberman writes …
“Diane is a tender, wrenching, beautifully made movie, a haunting first dramatic feature from Kent Jones, and the most accomplished dramatic feature screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a majestic film and a vision of turmoil, peace, mystery and memory, built around Mary Kay Place’s remarkable performance, along with something that hasn’t always accompanied this generation’s journey into old age: a glimpse of God.”
Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells has been raving about Diane since the beginning of the year — seems that he’s not alone in his enthusiasm, what with the 94% Rotten Tomatoes score the film has achieved.
Ty Burr, in the Boston Globewrites that Diane is “a quiet a tour-de-force”.
Part of Mick La Salle’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle reads …
“When I was a kid, my grandfather said something to me that I never forgot and that applies to this movie. ‘I’m 67,’ he said. ‘Twenty years ago, I was still a young man, and now I’m an old man.’ Diane is about something like that. It’s about the experience of early old age, the point in life where the memory and the identity of being young remain as fresh as ever, but the realities of aging are beginning to kick in.”
Some films you want to discover for yourself, without reading too much about it in advance, so that the film is fresh on the screen for you, and the process of discovery and revelation becomes deeply invested in you. Diane, now screening at The Vancity, is one such film.
Teen Spirit. Starring Elle Fanning.
Teen Spirit, which only a handful of people will see (alas), is VanRamblings favourite film of 2019, and certain to make our year end ‘best of’ list, an entirely revelatory and transformative, if small, British independent film starring the actress of her generation, the luminous Elle Fanning, who unlike Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody actually does her own singing.
Ms. Fanning plays Violet, a sensitive British 17-year-old who lives with her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a Polish immigrant, on the Isle of Wight. Aside from a beloved horse and her long disappeared father, not much defines Violet beyond her passion for music.
Violet’s days revolve around school, being mocked by the Island’s pretty-girl jerkettes, a dreary after school job at a local restaurant, helping her financially strapped and sullen mom manage their small family farm, and occasionally sneaking out to sing at a local pub.
Signing up to audition for a British pop show called “Teen Spirit,” director Max Minghella (an actor himself and the son of the late director Anthony Minghella of The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw during the film’s 92-minute running allow the audience to witness the beginnings of a young woman’s dreams of music making, giving a reluctant Violet the star treatment.
As Jesse Hassenger writes in his review in Slate …
“Teen Spirit may be about a singing competition, but this raw, slice of life film never devolves into the cynical undertaking you might expect. It’s refreshing, too, that Teen Spirit doesn’t view its heroine exclusively in terms of gatekeeping credibility, nor does it romanticize Violet’s life or the journey she’s on, which is to say that fortunate for us, Teen Spirit never sacrifices complexity on the altar of poptimism.”
Jeanette Catsoulis in her Critics Pick New York Times review writes of Violet, “the music might belong to Robyn and Ellie Goulding, but the journey from insecure child to tentative adult is all hers.”
Playing once daily, at 9:55pm, at Cineplex International Village.
Bedroom pop. Who’da thunk that such a thing even exists?
Bedroom pop is a sub-genre of Lo-fi (“low fidelity”), defined in 2019 as a DIY musical genre or aesthetic in which artists record at home on their own equipment, rather than in traditional recording spaces, the music characterized by contemplative lyrics, bedroom pop a contemporary indie re-invention of the once popular emo or dream pop musical genres.
There are a great many bedroom pop artists, but the most celebrated is Claire Cottrill (born August 18, 1998), known professionally as Clairo, an American recording artist from Carlisle, Massachusetts who wrote Pretty Girl, a lo-fi-produced song that attracted over 30 million views on YouTube.
At 16 years of age, Clairo wrote and produced Pretty Girl employing studio equipment in her bedroom (the equipment sometimes referred to as a digital audio workstation), as well as Pro Tools production software, while also recording and editing the video before uploading it to YouTube.
Home studios have been popular for decades, but have become ever more refined as computer technology has become increasingly sophisticated, enabling ever higher quality music production. One of VanRamblings favourite artists, Imogen Heap (who we interviewed and wrote about in 1997, at the outset of her career) records all of her music in her kitchen, where she’s set up a home studio that revolves around the use of Pro Tools.
As it happens, VanRamblings discovered bedroom pop during our recent bout of illness, when all we could manage to do most days was plunk ourselves down in front of Netflix — where we were very pleased to see that Crystal Moselle’s acclaimed Sundance and Tribeca award-winning film, Skate Kitchen, simply appeared out of the blue (and unheralded, but not by us) one very fine day, as one of the varied viewing options.
Vibrant, alive, poetic, superby shot and and richly informed, Ms. Moselle’s follow-up to her award-winning, one of a kind documentary, The Wolfpack, her fiction début emerges as the most accomplished film about skater culture since Catherine Hardwicke’s 2005 American biographical drama, The Lords of Dogtown (which is also available on Netflix).
The story goes that Moselle spotted two of the girls on the subway, introduced herself as a filmmaker, and asked if there were more girls like them. Indeed there were, all forming a feminist, sex-positive, shred-happy collective called the Skate Kitchen. Some time later, Moselle’s film arrived in Park City, with all the kids playing a version of themselves.
And who do you think the featured music artist on the soundtrack might be? Yep, you got it — none other than Clairo, who wrote and produced Heaven for the Skate Kitchen soundtrack.
So, while VanRamblings reveled in our discovery of Skate Kitchen on Netflix, we were also introduced to Clairo, and the contemporary musical genre known as “bedroom pop.” And now, you are familiar with Skate Kitchen (a must, must watch!), the work of Crystal Moselle, the musical genre of bedroom pop, and its most acclaimed progenitor, Clairo.
You know what’s exciting about life? That you get to discover something new, something that just yesterday you knew nothing about, every day.
The week of Christmas to New Year’s is the biggest box office film week of the year. More people go to the movies on Christmas Day through New Year’s Eve than attend films in the entire months of April and September.
In that one week last year, box office topped $500 million dollars, every seat was sold out, the line-ups were long, and chances are that if you didn’t purchase your ticket online in advance, you weren’t going to find a seat in the theatre for the movie you wanted to see. Count on the same in 2018.
The question remains, what to go and see at the theatre? Many people rely on Rotten Tomatoes, the film critic review aggregation site, although many others prefer MetaCritic, given that the site features only the most erudite, professional and trusted film critics on their better curated aggregation site.
Box office on the weekend before Christmas looked like this …
Okay, okay, enough of this folderol. Time to get on with why you’re here perusing VanRamblings today. Let’s start with …
Currently sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, the latest film from 2018 Best Picture Oscar award winner (Moonlight), Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk, here’s what The Telegraph’s lead film critic Tim Robey has to say: “If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.” Opens Christmas Day.
Although reviews for the new film from Adam McKay (The Big Short) are decidedly mixed, with a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, USA Today’s Brian Truitt writes about Vice, “Exquisitely crafted … It’s a strange little amalgamation that totally works: a vicious Shakespearean satire about power-hungry mind-sets, stealth corruption, American ambition and the current state of divided affairs in America, but also a quasi-fictional go-for-broke biopic about a political leader we really don’t know at all.”
Lots of Oscar buzz, though, most particularly for Christian Bale and Amy Adams, and even if it’s revisionist history — painting a far too rosy picture of the Bush administration — the film looks like fun. In the era of Trump, we need all the fun we can get. In this case, Vice may be just the ticket.
Here’s what the critics have to say about Bumblebee …
Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best Transformers movie released to date. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good Transformers movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.
What Bumblebee does best is remember that this is a franchise for the young, and embrace that fact without any shame while also still delivering on the action. There’s no self-importance, no grafting of ultra-patriotism and too-dense mythology onto what should be a simple narrative.
There’s a lot to like here, particularly Hailee Steinfeld’s performance.
Box office the weekend before Christmas doesn’t presage how a movie will do Christmas week: here’s betting that Bumblebee triumphs. Doesn’t really matter, though: Bumblebee’s foreign box office will easy double or triple the domestic, North American box office. Bumblebee seems recommendable.
With Shoplifters, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values & bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems, proving that Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Winner of the Palme d’or at Cannes this year, probable Best Foreign Language Oscar winner, currently playing at Cineplex International Village.
Note should be made that with Shoplifters, Kore-eda works in a beautiful register that feels both detailed and genuine at the same time, allowing us to get to know these characters so deeply that it is heart-wrenching, the film wise and insightful always, delicate, modest, skillful, compassionate, piercingly intelligent, poignant, memorable, and unexpectedly powerful.
Now, I’ve already written about the Best of 2018 at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre, the comfiest, friendliest and most welcoming cinema in Vancouver, this superlative year-end series programmed by the peerless Tom Charity. The 10 films in the series start their run on Wednesday, December 27th, and concludes eight glorious days later on Thursday, January 3rd. Not to be missed. See ya at the Vancity.
For more info on VIFF’s Best of 2018 series just click on the links.
And, oh yeah — don’t forget: Alfonso Cuarón’s probable Best Picture Oscar winner, Roma, continues to play to sold-out houses each day, exclusively at the Vancity Theatre. Gorgeous and moving, and also not to be missed.
And, finally, there’s this, an amalgam of films screening around Vancouver, or set to come to the Vancity, or opening near you, during the course of the next month, including a few Best Foreign Language Oscar nominees.
As occurs each December, Tom Charity — one of the kindest, most thoughtful and erudite men of our acquaintance, a great lover of film and who, as it happens, has long acted as the absolutely superb programmer of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s year-round Festival cinema venue, the Vancity Theatre, once again, this year, for your edification, enjoyment and just plain delight presents the Best of 2018, one time only, year-end, must-see screenings of the very best 2018 cinema had on offer.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Thursday, Dec. 27th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.
Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times arts critic, writes, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” casts a remarkable spell; it wraps around you, like a delicately scented cashmere shawl woven from music and color and astonishing faces.” Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, with its effortless display of poise, as Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper writes, “Anderson shoots and paces Phantom Thread almost like a 1950s mystery, and there ARE some dark elements of intrigue in the story — but this is not a Hitchcockian tale of lust and betrayal and murder. It’s a fascinating examination of an obsessive-compulsive, maddeningly self-centered, magnificently talented man.” Captivating, unsettling, entrancing.
Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Friday, December 28th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
Here’s what we wrote about Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace last Friday …
Far and away the strongest and most affecting independent film of 2018, director Debra Granik’s first outing since 2010’s multiple Oscar award nominee, Winter’s Bone (in which Jennifer Lawrence made her début, gaining a Best Actress Oscar nomination), Leave No Trace tracks a father and daughter living precariously off the grid, introducing us to an incandescent 17-year-old Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who lives a tranquil life sheltered with her loving, PTSD suffering father, Ben Foster, in an urban Oregon woodland, in perfect harmony with one another, despite all. Uncompromising, authentic, raw, heartbreaking, brilliant, haunting, full of grace, and riveting throughout, Leave No Trace is a multiple Gotham & Indie Spirit Award nominee — including Best Actor, Supporting Actress, Director and Feature — and a must-see Best of 2018 film screening.
This past week, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie was designated as the National Board of Review’s Breakthrough Performance award winner!
Make sure you catch The Death of Stalin on Saturday, Dec. 29th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.
This past spring, recently-elected Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick and her husband, renowned actor Garry Chalk, caught a screening of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin at the Fifth Avenue Cinema, and came out of the theatre raving about the film to all who would listen. High praise, indeed, from persons of conscience in our community who cherish film as the critically important art form of our age.
Says New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, “The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs,” Iannucci’s take-no-prisoners directorial style perfect for this blackest of farces, political satire of the first order, and a farcical, frightening and a timely reminder that things could always be worse — which in the time of Trump is going some.
Part of a double bill, Mandy on Saturday, December 29th, 10:10pm, Vancity Theatre.
Says CineVue’s Tom Duggins, “Mandy is not just hideous, hilarious and thrilling — although, it’s all of those and then some — it’s also a meditation on personal grief which loses no poignancy for all its blood-soaked insanity and eye-melting psychedelia.” Not enough praise?
Try this, from the Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov, “Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically-inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.”
Multiple award winner, Foxtrot, on Sunday, December 30th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 74th annual Venice Film Festival, says the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, “Samuel Maoz’s award-winning Israeli film is graced by superb performances, especially from Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler, this gentle, dreamlike but admirably process film offers a devastating portrait that bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments,” and as the Los Angeles Times’ lead film critic Kenneth Turan writes in his review of Foxtrot, “An intricate, dazzling cinematic dance, Foxtrot goes both deeper in and further out than standard-issue cinema. It’s profound and moving and wild and crazy at the same time, simultaneously telling a specific story and offering an emotional snapshot of a country whose very soul seems to be at risk.”
Paddington 2, on Monday, December 31st at noon (New Year’s Eve!), Vancity Theatre.
Probably the most enthusiastically reviewed film of 2018 — and this from a usually cynical crowd of film critics — here’s just a bit of what’s been written about Paddington 2: “An exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline (Justin Chang, L.A. Times); and from Time Out London film critic, Helen O’Hara, “It’s a family adventure that’s the right sort of heartwarming, delivering real human emotion through the medium of a small bear.” Others have written about Paddington 2: exemplary, beguiling, enchanting, whimsical, heartfelt, humane, delightful, heartwarming, and “a sequel that surpasses the superb original.”
First Reformed, on Tuesday, January 1st at 7:45pm (New Year’s Day!), Vancity Theatre.
Perhaps the best reviewed art film of 2018, a comeback film for Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), winner of the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle & Gotham Awards for Best Actor for Ethan Hawke — the prohibitive favourite for a Best Actor Oscar — as well as Best Screenplay for Schrader with both critics’ organizations, critic Godfrey Chesire writing, “A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists,” while Roger Moore in Movie Nationwrites, “A powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated acting of Ethan Hawke.” Not to be missed.
The first feature film to be spoken entirely in the Haida language, Sgaawaay K’uuna is based on a popular Haida legend, Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman), the 19th century set film relating the tale of two families who gather together for their annual Haida Gwaii fishing camp.
A man, Adiits’ii (Tyler York), flees into a forest and transforms into a Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman) after experiencing a tragedy. Throughout, Sgaawaay K’uuna offers mythic, human scale storytelling, where every life is sacred and no one is beyond redemption, as riveting a tale of survival and forgiveness as you’ll see this year, or any other year. Sgaaway K’uuna, or Edge of the Knife is derived from the Haida saying: ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife; as you go along, you have to be careful or you will fall off one side or the other.’
Sorry to Bother You, on Wednesday, January 2nd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
One the best reviewed comedies of the summer of 2018, Sorry to Bother You offers a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian speculative fiction, and inspired/demented midnight-movie Silicon Valley satire — it’s also as funny and as caustic as hell. Oh, and did we say that Boots Riley’s début feature film is also a welcome hand grenade of subversive power that is all at once incendiary, hilarious, alarming, anti-capitalist, infectious, absurdist and provocative? Gosh, I think we just did.
Support the Girls, on Thursday, January 3rd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
Saving the best for last, writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s heart-of-gold film offers a fresh perspective on the lives of marginalized people, in a story about sex, race, class, and age, all without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing, even given its winking/earnest double entendre of a title.
Here’s what respected film critic John Anderson had to say in the Wall Street Journal …
The unlikely, bittersweet, bristling comedy Support the Girls is easily one of the best films of the year, and the most sympathetic to women, despite having been made by a man. How can this be? Luckily, Andrew Bujalski’s remarkable movie — with its killer performance by Regina Hall (who just won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nod) is not just about women. It’s about men being idiots. And no one is arguing ownership of that narrative.
Humble, restrained, breezy, heartwarming, never hectoring, delicate, cogent, tender, tough, empathetic, controlled, victorious, tumultuous, brilliant, bracing & utterly phenomenal, you need to see Support the Girls.
